In Thunderbird: View | Message Body As | Plain Text
This is always on and in my experience any email that becomes ineligible because of that is not worth my attention.
That's nice, but there's no Thuderbird for tablets or phones, and the
numbers I've seen say it has about a 2% share of desktop users. Your
ASCII art does look fine in Alpine which is what we Real Men(tm) use.
Even if I could find an MUA that showed messages in fixed pitch text, on a
tablet, it would be too small for my tired old eyes to read, and on a
phone too small for anyone to read. There's a reason MIME added
proportional fonts and flowed text, so that actual people can read their
mail.
It's amazing how many people here appear to believe that mail was perfect
in the 1990s and nothing has changed. I better not ask if anyone uses
IPv6.
R's,
John
On 8/21/23 19:05, John R Levine wrote:
While I greatly admire your ASCII art in principle, I regret to report that on my Android phone and iPad it's completely illegible.
Much though some of us might wish otherwise, it's not 1990 any more, and fixed pitch ASCII text isn't what most mail programs expect or display.
(On the other hand, if you'd sent HTML mail and wrapped it in <pre> or used <tt> it'd have looked fine.
R's,
John
On Mon, 21 Aug 2023, Marc Petit-Huguenin wrote:
On 8/21/23 15:44, Christian Huitema wrote:
What about | Simple proposal: we should move our culture to top-posting. No tool
side-posting? | needed. Don't worry too much bout text/plain versus text/html.
It's fun. |
I think that this | Or middle posting, where | thread clearly exposed the problem. Many IETF
participants follow | I inject my text right | the a long established practice of commenting on
email by editing the | in the middle of the | message and inserting their comments inline wit> the text. That | message. | practice does not align with the fraction of the
participants who prefer | I d v | top posting. It also does not align with
existing MUA that follow | o e | a variety of conventions for inserting
comments inline comments | c r | in response, to the point that after a few
replies it becomes very | a t t | hard to understand who exactly made what
argument. | n h i |
| a c |
As I mentioned in a | a t a | previous mail, the IETF could in theory enforce
that mail would be sent | l l | in text/plain, but this is not realistic, as
many participants either | s l | are accustomed to always use HTML or do not
have a choice. Besides, | o y | even a return to plain text would not solve
the confusion between | . | inline commenting and top posting, or the
formatting mess caused by different inline conventions of different
MUA.
Moving to top-posting only would solve these issues. It will be a bit
less easy for some commenters, who would have to explicitly copy and
paste the fragments of message to which they reply, but it would
definitely solve the top-posting vs. inline comment issue. It would
also solve the issue with formatting of inline comments, because each
"top" message would stand on its own, and presumably be presented
exactly as its sender intended.
If participants chooses to write in text/plain, their messages would
be presented accordingly, and if other participants chose text/html,
this would mostly work too. The only ambiguity would be multipart
messages with different content in text/plain and text/html -- but
here too, the solution is probably in the culture.
-- Christian Huitema
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@xxxxxxxxx, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
